State of the Calgary Twittersphere – Hashtags & Links

This is the third part in my State of the Calgary Twittersphere for 2012 – you can read the overview post here. As we saw in that entry, local users posted more than 5 million tweets containing links. They also posted about 5 million tweets containing hashtags. Let’s take a closer look at what exactly they tweeted about in 2012.

It’s difficult to extract a lot value out of links because everything is trapped behind the t.co wrapper, but I did want to highlight the time of day that links seem to be posted. Recall that the hourly peak for tweet volume in general comes at around 9 PM, whereas for tweets containing links the peak is 11 AM.

Local users used about 1.1 million different hashtags in 2012. Hashtags ranged in length from 1 character to 139, excluding the hash, and they were used for just about every purpose you can think of. The average hashtag length was 14 characters.

The most popular hashtag of all is still #yyc, followed by #calgary (#yyc is about 6 times more popular than #calgary). In total, #yyc was used about 600,000 times by local users which works out to 11.9% of all local tweets containing hashtags.

Though not as prevalent in the top 100, local users did use #yyc-related hashtags quite frequently. In total, about 2500 different hashtags were used that start with #yyc. A little more than half of those were used just once, and just 22 were used 1000 times or more.